Perl 5.13.3 is released

Look at Crowley, doing 110 mph on the M40 heading towards
Oxfordshire. Even the most resolutely casual observer would
notice a number of strange things about him. The clenched teeth,
for example, or the dull red glow coming from behind his
sunglasses. And the car. The car was a definite hint.

Crowley had started the journey in his Bentley, and he was
dammned if he wasn't going to finish it in the Bentley as well.
Not that even the kind of car buff who owns his own pair of
motoring goggles would have been able to tell it was a vintage
Bentley. Not any more. They wouldn't have been able to tell
that it was a Bentley. They would only offer fifty-fifty that it
had ever even been a car.

There was no paint left on it, for a start. It might still have
been black, where it wasn't a rusty, smudged reddish-brown, but
this was a dull charcoal black. It traveled in its own ball of
flame, like a space capsule making a particularly difficult
re-entry.

There was a thin skin of crusted, melted rubber left around the
metal wheel rims, but seeing that the wheel rims were still
somhow riding an inch above the road surface this didn't seem to
make an awful lot of difference to the suspension.

It should have fallen apart miles back.

-- Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, "Good Omens"

It gives me great pleasure to announce the release of Perl 5.13.3.

This is the fourth DEVELOPMENT release in the 5.13.x series leading to a stable release of Perl 5.14.0. You can find a list of high-profile changes in this release in the file "perl5133delta.pod" inside the distribution.

You can (or will shortly be able to) download the 5.13.3 release from:

This release corresponds to commit 414abf8 in Perl's git repository. It is tagged as 'v5.13.3'.

We welcome your feedback on this release.

If Perl 5.13.3 works well for you, please use the 'perlthanks' tool included with this distribution to tell the all-volunteer development team how much you appreciate their work.

If you discover issues with Perl 5.13.3, please use the 'perlbug' tool included in this distribution to report them.

If you write software in Perl, it is particularly important that you test your software against development releases. While we strive to maintain source compatibility with prior stable versions of Perl wherever possible, it is always possible that a well-intentioned change can have unexpected consequences. If you spot a change in a development version which breaks your code, it's much more likely that we will be able to fix it before the next stable release. If you only test your code against stable releases of Perl, it may not be possible to undo a backwards-incompatible change which breaks your code.

Perl 5.13.3 represents approximately one month of development since Perl 5.13.2, and contains 12,184 lines of changes across 575 files from 104 authors and committers.

Notable changes in this release:

\o{...} has been added as a string escape for octals.

\N{} and charnames::vianame now know about the abbreviated character names listed by Unicode, such as NBSP, SHY, etc.

Most dual-life module have been synchronized with the latest production release on CPAN.

There is a new internal function PL_blockhook_register for XS code to hook into Perl's lexical scope mechanism

There is one major known issue:

Bug fixes involving CvGV reference counting break Sub::Name (currently version 0.04). A patch has been sent upstream to the maintainer.